At the end of FY14, SERS has 62,844 active members, and 53,478 retirees. The total actuarial value of assets amount to $13.316 billion, with an actuarial accrued liability of $39.527 billion. In comparison, at the end of FY13, SERS had 61,545 active members, and 51,994 retirees. The total actuarial value of assets amounted to $11.877 billion, with an actuarial liability of $34,720 billion.

For example, the PPD is showing that there are more annuitants than actives in recent years:

To be sure, it can be that some of those annuitants are not being counted among retirees, being widows/widowers or beneficiary children or the like. There is also the issue of divorced retirees whose ex-spouses also receive benefits.

Yeah, one often sees these numbers games. Yes, it’s nice to juice the retiree-to-active ratio like that so it seems that one is still smaller than the other. But the other benefits are also coming out of the fund.

It is kind of important to note that there are more people getting benefits out of the fund than are currently employed.

On the same page, I want to note something that I didn’t include above:

Contributions

$248,169,706 Employees

$1,531,932,137 Employer

…..

$1,799,965,655 Benefits Paid

[squint]

Here, let me do some simple math:

Total Contributions: $1,780,101,843
Total Benefits: $1,799,965,655

Contributions – Benefits = -$19,863,812

That’s negative.

Oh, to be sure, the assets should be throwing off cash as well, but let’s see how adequate the pension assets are, shall we?

Hmmmm. Less than 40% funded. I know I get all tetchy about the 80% fundedness thing, but 40% is AWFUL.

The green bar indicating undercontributions to the plan is, indeed, the largest, and makes up 29% of the ending unfunded liability

HOWEVER, as noted in an earlier post, the bar for the change in actuarial assumptions is mainly coming from the change in the valuation rate in both 2010 and 2014. The expected return on assets is now 7.25%, which is a bit different from the 8% which it used to be.

(and yes, I see the valuation rate itself is 7.09% due to the effect of borrowing to make up gaps, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now.)

Let’s go to the Public Plans Database and see what they have on SERS’s rate of return:

Okay, both 5-year and 10-year horizons for public pensions investing is very short. But it seems to me that SERS is not performing very well.

So SERS was one of the worst of the state pensions in my Illinois data set, which is why I started here. But the other ones: TRS (teachers), SURS (universities), GARS (Illinois legislature), JRS (judges) are not doing very well. Actually, GARS is the worst of the set with a funded ratio of about 20%.

These numbers are awful. Even that puny COLA bill didn’t chew away at this problem very much.